A painter before being a filmmaker, Wim Wenders still has a third profession that he prioritizes over all others: that of traveler. And without a camera there is no trip. He has spent decades photographing dusty roads and lonely landscapes, capturing the essence of big cities and tiny towns, deserts, roads, hotels... In his images there are almost never any human traces, although the places speak of people, stories that have passed or are about to happen. He has the gift of knowing how to listen to them.
His photographic work, in which he uses panoramic views and large formats, has been exhibited in galleries and museums around the world and now, coinciding with his presence at the BCN Film Fest, he is at the two venues of the Villa del Arte gallery (Paseo de Gràcia 30 and Carrer de la Palla, 10, where the main corpus of the sample is located). Under the title Unbegrenzt (Without limits), Wenders has brought together a selection of stills from some of his iconic films (Paris Texas, Beyond the Clouds, In the Course of Time or Sky over Berlin) along with those others, "quietly strange or strangely silent" that he has been taking in the many countries he has visited.
Wenders has lived attached to a camera since his father gave him one when he was six years old. Then life led him to study medicine, psychology, romance languages, philosophy for short periods of time... For a while he also dedicated himself to playing the saxophone and painting until cinema, which has exalted him as one of the greats, overshadowed his work with the brush. "But my main profession is that of a traveler," he says. "And I couldn't do it without a camera, I'd feel naked. It's like second nature." As essential to get there as the car or the plane, that which allows him to capture the "essence" of a place the first time he sees it.
Sometimes the shoots take him to places that he didn't even know existed and other times he is the one who sets out for the simple pleasure of finding them. Photographing them has nothing to do with a notebook or a visual diary. "The iPhone is already there for that. When I photograph I like to have a real camera that gives me the highest quality possible. The ones I take with my mobile I could throw them all away, but I would never part with a real photograph." "A photo is something really unique that is only captured once. With the mobile, you can take millions of images but it is a real waste of time," he considers.
Wenders is fascinated by places for their ability to tell stories. "What I try to capture is not the external appearance of a place, a landscape or a city, but the life story that a place is telling me. And cameras are incredibly accurate recording instruments for that. I am more a witness than a photographer". Why do you always choose spaces empty of people? "Places get quiet if there are people," he replies. "If a person appears in the shot, they stop seeing the place. I really like a photo in which a woman appears in a window. It's one of the few I've done in which people appear. But if she wasn't there they would see something else. I always wait until everyone has disappeared from the shot, only then do places start to talk."
Absence is more eloquent than presence, and places continue to be an expression of "the common history of the people who inhabit them, of the traces left by people who are no longer there, of the pain they suffered or of the hopes that they deposited there," says the director of the Buena Vista Social Club. His photographs, he admits, are more the work of a painter than a filmmaker, an activity he has never abandoned. To Barcelona, where he has come to receive the BCN Film Fest 2023 Honor Award, he has brought a camera and a box of watercolors.
